


Decennial Blood Sacrifice and Pledge Drive

by BarefootWanderer



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Carlos is a mess, Cecil sometimes forgets to mention important things, Eventual Smut, Fluff and Angst, Gen, I promise, M/M, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-17
Updated: 2014-11-08
Packaged: 2018-01-12 20:33:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1199242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BarefootWanderer/pseuds/BarefootWanderer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's that time again, listeners....</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Wednesday

**Author's Note:**

> Everything will be okay, I promise.

“It’s alright, you know,” said the police officer from his bushes.  This was, of course, false.  Nothing was alright.  It was possible, likely even, that nothing would ever be alright again.  It had been a long time since Carlos had been faced with a situation that he genuinely believed was unfixable, but then it had been a long time since he had been in love, and he had never lost someone quite the way he had just lost Cecil.  He hadn’t properly lost anyone, before this.  Past lovers had drifted away over the course of weeks, or stormed out in a rage at 2 pm on a Sunday, and once, notably, physically removed the confused scientist from where he stood dumbfounded in the kitchen, but this was new and awful.

Breakups, fights, even infidelity, were familiar, if unpleasant phenomena, and he would trade all of them in a heartbeat rather than feel the horrific, gaping ache that now ruled his life.  Cecil had been taken from him, ripped away, and all he had left was a sucking chest wound to remind him where the man had been.

He drifted through his lab, turning equipment on or off as needed, not really paying attention to his work.  He checked the samples in the fridge and nearly dropped the tray when he realized that he had forgotten to tell Cecil that he loved him when the broadcaster had left the house the day before.  He prayed, to no god in particular, that he had kissed the man, or at least smiled at him.  When he found he was unable to remember all he could bring himself to do was sit in front of a microscope and stare at a strangely-musical soil sample as he fought to run the morning through his mind as accurately as possible.

 

He had sat at the table, reading over his assistants’ lab notes from the week.  One of the two had had the bright idea of spelling the findings out in scrabble tiles and photographing them.  It was less efficient than writing, but also substantially less dangerous.  Cecil had wandered into the kitchen as he was finishing up and pressed his customary kiss into Carlos’ hair.  Carlos was pretty sure that he had grunted some kind of greeting to Cecil at this point, but could not, almost thirty hours later, be certain.

They had shuffled around each other as they often did on weekday mornings, trading smiles and quick kisses until Carlos made it to the door.  Cecil had grabbed his hand at this point, beaming at him.  “Carlos, I forgot to tell you!  I’ve been asked to participate in the station’s decennial blood sacrifice and fundraising ceremony tonight.”

“That’s… um… nice?”

Cecil nodded.  “It’s a great and terrible honor.  Don’t forget to donate!”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” murmured Carlos, pulling Cecil close.  He pressed a kiss against that brilliant mouth, marveling once again that he could be so close to the heart of another person’s livelihood.  It wasn’t as though Cecil got to press his hands against Carlos’ skills at math and pattern recognition after all. 

Cecil pulled away and smiled at Carlos for what would be the last time.  “Go.  You’ll be late.”  He pushed his scientist out the door.  “I look forward to talking about your work with the singing dirt!”

 

Cecil had spoken about the dirt on his show that night, between segments about sports and the pledge drive the station was holding.  Carlos had, of course, called in to offer money.  His pledge was met with violent hissing, which he had taken to be a sign of acceptance, and he had hung up the phone to return to his work.

Not ten minutes later, there was a gut-wrenching cry of pain and fear.  Carlos and his labmates all sat bolt upright, shaken from their studies, rendered speechless by the terrified, agonized noises coming from the radio.  It took Carlos nearly thirty seconds of staring at the machine, praying that the noises would stop, to realize that he knew that voice, that the whole damn town knew that voice.

Cecil screamed and kept screaming as Carlos jumped to his feet, pulling on a hat and grabbing his car keys.  He was halfway out the door when one of his lab mates grabbed him by the arm to stop him.  Carlos realized that there was no more screaming.  The radio had fallen silent.  He turned back to the room, conscious of his colleague’s eyes on him, and stared with increasing nausea at the radio.  It was silent.

Carols had never minded quiet.  He had favored libraries as a child, and empty rooms where he could read.  He had enjoyed sitting in parks where there was no one to speak to him, and no distracting noise of music or tv.  Silence was comforting in its simplicity.  This brand of silence, however, was new and terrifying.  It wasn’t warm and patient like silence usually was.  This was cold and unforgiving, and Carlos was suddenly, irrationally compelled to fill it with prayer.  He could think of nothing else.

There was, quite suddenly, a slick, wet, rasping noise.  Carlos jumped.  Then Cecil’s voice, ragged and broken in a way that nearly gutted Carlos, said only “Listeners-”

The voice cut out, replaced by the music that signaled the end of the show.  A woman’s voice, mild and disinterested, began to speak.  “Welcome to Night Vale is a production of Night Vale Community Radio.  This has been the decennial blood sacrifice.  This year’s victim was Cecil Gershwin-Palmer.  To the family of Cecil, we thank you for your contributions and apologize for any inconvenience.  The pledge drive will continue until we reach our goal, so please consider donating or….”

Carlos was sitting on the floor.  He suspected, although he couldn’t be certain, that he had lowered himself somewhere around the phrase “blood sacrifice.”  It had seemed like a reasonable response at the time, and he stood by it, as it were.  He thought he would be well within his rights to scream, but could not muster the energy to do so.  There was a rushing in his ears.  Perhaps if he laid down?

 

When he next opened his eyes, he was staring at the ceiling of his lab, conscious of the fact that he was lying on the cot set up in the back room.  He looked at the digital clock on the desk and noted with distant interest that it read “egg.”  He looked back at the ceiling, and considered getting out of bed.  Then he remembered the sound of Cecil’s screams, made harsher, less real, through the radio, and realized there was no reason to do anything at this point.  He lay on the cot, probing gingerly at the new knowledge keeping him awake and prone.

Cecil was dead.  He was gone.  He had ceased to be.  There would be no more omelets on Sunday mornings, no more discussions of his own stars and how they differed to strangely from the stars of Night Vale.  He would have no one to contemplate the void with, no one to remind him to replace his aging bloodstones, no one to kiss so late at night that it was basically just very early.

Carlos didn’t like how easily his mind had accepted its new reality.  All he’d done was faint, after all, and already he had wrapped his brain around the fact that Cecil was never coming home.  He felt a little guilty for that.  Cecil deserved more- he deserved a man who weep for him, would tear his hair and drive to the station to demand answers.  Cecil deserved-

_Had deserved_ , said a voice in his mind.  _Cecil had deserved_.  Oh yes.  Tenses were tricky things, to be paid special attention in times like these.  Cecil had deserved all those things, and more, but now he… didn’t.  Wasn’t.  Was not.

Carlos, quite deliberately turned toward the wall.  He considered crying.

 

When he woke again the lab was dark and quiet.  This told him very little.  The clock now read “eggs.”  Seeing this as a progression of sorts, he stood and made his way toward the door into the main room.  It was quiet but for the idling machinery, empty of all life.

Numbly, he began to lock up and started for home, because what else was he to do?


	2. Thusday & Friday

“It’s going to be all right,” said Ian again, almost kindly.

“Thank you,” said Carlos automatically. He was careful to speak not to Ian, but to the bush the man inhabited. It was considered more polite. There was a trick to it, one that Cecil had spent hours trying to teach him… Carlos leaned his head against his front door, weighing the pros and cons of collapsing on his porch for the night. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t believe you right now.”

As he fished in his pocket for his keys, hands not quite steady, a thought occurred to him. “Ian…”

“Hm?

“Do I have to go to the station? To… pick anything up?” He phrased the question as delicately as he could. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to form the words “Do I need to claim my boyfriend’s body” without throwing up yet.

Ian conferred with someone else in another bush and said “The paperwork is completed. He will be returned to you in due time.”

It was still dark, or possibly dark again when he woke. He reached out on instinct, only to find empty space and a cold pillow. He fell back, defeated, remembering that Cecil would not be next to him in the mornings any more.

It dawned on him that he would need to start seriously reevaluating most, if not all, aspects of his life.

So many of his plans for the future had, whether explicitly or implicitly, included Cecil. Many had depended on him entirely. He had been planning on surprising Cecil with dinner next week- he would have to cancel the reservations. They had been discussing the purchase of a new lawn mower, but was it worth it at this point? He wasn’t sure he could afford to maintain the property on his salary alone, so moving might be in his future, such as it was.

The thought of a Future, capital “f,” stretching out before him, devoid of an enthusiastic, ominous radio host with clever hands and a quick tongue, coffee on his breath and love in his eyes….

Carlos turned onto his side, curling against himself on the corner of the bed, and pulled the blanket over him. The thought of a future without Cecil was too much for him. He wanted to scream, to cry (to curl himself around the man he loved and who had madly and impossibly _stopped being_ the day before yesterday). Or the day before that. The clocks didn’t work and Cecil had- Carlos’s watch was with- was wherever Cecil’s body was. It rankled him that he wasn’t sure exactly how long Cecil had been dead. Carlos wanted to know the exact second, to engrave the date and time and place that his life had self-destructed on his memory forever. But he would never know that. It was simply one more gap, another void that would go unfilled.

He curled himself tighter, feeling Cecil’s absence more keenly than he knew he could feel, at all, and tried to will himself out of existence, eyes dry. 

Time passed. Carlos could not verify this, did not even have a clear sense of it occurring, but based on past experience it was doing so and would continue to do so. He didn’t quite have it in him to be glad about that, but he… appreciated it, in a sort of passive way. It was important that something remain constant and predictable, now that his life had taken a turn for the absurd in the worst way possible.

 _“My boyfriend has been killed to raise funds for a radio station,”_ he said out loud. It was almost funny, like the plot of a bad supernatural soap opera.

What did one do in this situation? Carlos had several contingency plans in place for a variety of scenarios, but it had never occurred to him that he might suddenly find himself- what? The only word that came to mind was “widowed” and that wasn’t right.

What he and Cecil had had, what they had passed back and forth between them like a tiny, living thing, fragile and needy, had taken Carlos almost entirely by surprise. He had come to this town to work, to learn, to solve even the goddamnsest of puzzles that it threw at him night and day, and sure enough he had managed to do ~~all~~ most of that. And somehow, between the buzzing shadow-things and the hostile oranges and books that sparked and smelled like meat, between the fear and the frustration, and, much later, the bemused acceptance, between running for his life, and pacing through his lab for days, and barely remembering his mandatory weekly pizza, Carlos had fallen in love. He had molded his life around another person, and now that Cecil was gone he was unable to remember how things had been shaped before.

He found himself thinking incongruously of a slinky he had owned as a child. The thing had confounded him for weeks- he understood how they worked now, of course, but at the time he had been frustrated by the steady, incomprehensible, predictability of the thing. He reacted in the way that seemed most reasonable to him, by finding a heavy book and a set of pliers almost too large for his child’s hands to grasp. He had unwound the thing steadily, methodically, trying to figure out what made it _go_. When he had hammered it almost straight, and felt satisfied that the curviness was the reason it was fun and that it didn’t do fun things when it was less curvy, he had brought it to his father to demand that it be fixed.

The man had taken Carlos’ tiny hands gently in his own and explained that sometimes when you destroy a thing it is gone for good.

Carlos lurched out of bed, suddenly irrationally angry. What was the _point?_ What was the point of having something so fragile and losing it? Why did anyone bother trying to build any kind of life at all, let alone a perfect one, if it could be casually and brutally destroyed in the space of forty seconds? _Thirty-seven,_ Carlos mentally corrected himself. _Cecil screamed for thirty-seven seconds._ He had counted. 

_There had been a reason,_ he reminded himself. _Before Cecil, there was always a reason._ There had always been a reason he didn’t date, didn’t put himself out there. Flings, yes. Friends with benefits, sure. But real, long-term, serious relationships? Never. He had convinced himself, always, that it wasn’t worth it. That something could be worse than being alone. That there were reasons, good reasons not to put himself at risk like that. He had believed it, too, right until Cecil had started answering his calls with a weirdly erotic purr that Carlos felt filthy to admit he enjoyed (who knew the word “hello” could be so dirty, anyway?). And now, quite suddenly, Cecil was the reason.  
Cecil was the reason he threw himself into his work with a fervor he hadn’t managed since his graduate days. Cecil was the reason he strode into the lab around midday and unplugged the radio before he began barking order to his labmates, not caring whether they were obeyed. Cecil was the reason he started working and didn’t stop until it was dark and his hands were shaking, until he dropped a beaker and Angela grabbed him by the elbow and tugged him into the back room. She pushed him onto the cot and forced a granola bar into his hands.

“You’ll be doing more harm than good until you get some sleep,” she said. “There’s no point in you working if we’re just going to waste time cleaning up after you. Get some rest.”

 

He began to protest, weakly, but Angela was having none of it and left the room. He decided that it would do no harm to nap for a while.

He awoke hours later, feeling slightly more alert, if not refreshed. He went back to the lab, noticing that Angela was gone and had been replaced by Habib and Ellen.

“How long was I out?” he asked of no one in particular. 

Ellen glanced at the timekeeping corner, which involved several hourglasses and some candles. “Uh, four hours, give or take?”

Carlos grunted and went back to work. He spent several hours running redundant, desultory tests, too exhausted to manage complex thought, and staggered back home when the other two left, unwilling to defend himself to Angela again.

He collapsed on the sofa with no idea of what time it was, too tired to really function and unable to face going to bed alone. “Netflix it is,” he muttered to himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I just realized this might get a little... porny? Toward the end. Would that bother anyone? I can keep it PG and just do a more adult one-shot sequel if that's better? Thoughts are appreciated.


	3. Friday Evening

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is hella short, but it felt right to post it on its own, rather than with the next one.

Cecil woke screaming, his body stiff with rigor mortis and remembered pain. When he had regained himself somewhat, he managed to croak “Great and terrible honor my ass.” He looked at the calendar that had been thoughtfully provided for him and swore softly. Nearly three days out? That was a new record. Clearly he was slipping. Either that or the ridiculous morning DJ they had recently hired was just not cutting it.

He checked his watch and noticed with no small amount of satisfaction that it was still running, at that it was just past eight pm. If he was quick about his paperwork, there might still be time for dinner with Carlos. If he was very quick, he might even have time after dinner to properly apologize for being gone so long.


	4. Intermission

Hi all, sorry about the delay in getting anything else up. I wanted to assure everyone that this fic has not been abandoned, but unfortunately I may have permanently lost the rest of it due to computer trouble. Recovery is in the works, but it's not looking too hopeful, and I will probably have to start the last two or three chapters again from scratch. All I ask is that you guys bear with me. Seeing kudos in my email every couple of days has really kept me going!


	5. Friday Night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After an epic seven-moth hiatus, we are back. Thank you guys for being so patient- I did lose most of this and had to rewrite a lot from scratch/fragments scribbled on napkins and hidden about my effects. In the meantime, this fic now comes (heh) complete with bonus eldritch horror smut! Or, it will. This chapter just has regular smut, for those of you squicked by monstery things. Next chapter though- monstery smut. See my other works for details.

The radio (he swore he had unplugged this one too) turned itself on. Carlos, jolted out of his reverie, looked at it out of habit, then looked away. Of course it still did that, and of course it wasn’t Cecil. It was the disinterested woman he remembered from the lab. “This concludes our decennial fundraising. We have exceeded our goals, both monetary and sanguinary, and thank you for your contributions. We return to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow. Today’s proverb: “Nothing is forever; what are you waiting for?” Now, stay tuned for sleeping ocelots and a band saw.”

The proverb, more than anything, was what got Carlos going. It was true, of course- nothing was forever. He rose and moved into the kitchen, ready to do the dishes in the sink. Cecil was dead. That was a fact at this point. Cecil was dead and Carlos… _wasn’t._ He was alive, and the pain? The pain would pass, as all pain did. He would wake up each day marginally less inclined to die, until one day, one glorious day, he would be alright again. Himself. Whole.

The thought of not missing Cecil anymore almost sent him back to the couch. But Carlos was already in motion, and if Bill Nye had taught him one thing, it was that inertia was a property of matter. He made it over to the sink and picked up Cecil’s coffee mug to wash, because Cecil hated it when the dishes went undone. The voice in the back of Carlos’ mind reminded him, gently and without malice, that Cecil was gone and what the man had wanted – emphasis on _had_ \- was pretty much irrelevant at this point.

“It’s the principle of the thing,” muttered Carlos to himself.

“That’s the spirit, son,” responded Ian from the bushes, not unkindly.

Some time later he wasn’t finished, but he couldn’t bring himself to do much more. Progress had been made, and he felt accomplished. He was tired, and he could tell by the subtle changes in the bird calls offered by Ian and his partner Denise that it was nearly time to sleep anyway. The idea of waking up alone still sent a harsh, rheumatic ache through his chest, but he had very little choice at this point. He refused to sleep in the lab anymore, and at least here there were things that smelled of Cecil.

He walked aimlessly through the apartment, tidying up, delaying the inevitable. An empty bed was not an inviting concept. He was in the process of forcing the closet door closed when he heard what sounded like a set of keys being tried, one by one, in the lock of his door.

Carlos froze, grabbed a broom from where it leaned propping the closet door open, and retreated into the kitchen. Whoever it was clearly didn’t have a flashlight- they were fumbling loudly on the stoop, apparently blind in the dark. The door opened. Carlos raised the broom over his head, ready to brain the intruder. This was obviously not a member of the Sherriff’s Secret Police who a) tended to enter through windows, rather than doors; b) would not fail repeatedly the “breaking” portion of the process “breaking and entering”; and c) would not enter a house while the occupant was 1) present; and 2) in mourning. 

The light in the next room came on. Clearly he was being robbed very, very poorly. Had he dropped his keys outside somewhere? There were footsteps coming gradually closer. Carlos tensed, trying to time his strike to hit the intruder over the head without giving them time to react. How hard did you have to hit a person to knock them out, anyway? Would the broom survive?

The footsteps grew closer. Apparently the housebreaker knew exactly where to go, because there was no hesitation in the movement. Carlos took a deep breath as whoever it was approached the doorway, hoping that they would cooperate and go through without turning so that he could brain them.

And cooperate they did.

Carlos’ brain took a few seconds to size up his opponent- average height (making him slightly taller than Carlos, good thing the broom was long), neither fat nor thin (Carlos almost certainly outweighed him. Almost) and god that coat was fuck ugly and hadn’t he seen it before- as he began to swing the broom downward. His mouth moved even more quickly, though, and he managed to stop the broom just in time to shout “ _Cecil?_ ”

The housebreaker turned, smiled a huge, genuine, love-struck smile, and walked toward Carlos, who could only stare, broom still raised over his head, at Cecil. The radio host insinuated himself into the ring of Carlos’ arms, between his body and the broom, and squeezed. The broom clattered to the floor with a jarring noise that Carlos knew should have bothered him, but he was too distracted by the feeling of Cecil in his arms to care.

Cecil was warm and smelled like home and antiseptic. His arms were familiar and beautifully tight and, and Carlos noticed, for the first time ever, just how lovely the soft, worn linen of a favorite tunic felt against his cheek as he buried his face in Cecil’s shoulder. 

He was running on automatic again. _Cecil is here. Cecil’s not dead- Cecil is here. Cecil is here, not dead. Cecil is not dead, but here. Cecil is not dead. Not dead. Here._

His arms wrapped themselves around the radio host with him telling them to, and he leaned into the embrace out of habit, and out of habit his face turned upwards when Cecil pulled back ever so slightly. And out of habit (instinct? fate?) his lips parted when Cecil pressed his mouth against them, as his head tilted itself into the kiss. Cecil hummed into his mouth and Carlos found his internal monologue cut off short.

The voice he had never hoped to hear again, that had won first his fear, then his respect, and finally his heart, was reverberating in him. He could feel it thrumming from his sinuses to his toes, and suddenly the world was in focus again. 

_Cecil_ was here. Cecil was _kissing him,_ all relief and passion and warm, welcoming joy the likes of which Carlos had known nowhere else, and had not hoped to find again. Things were _all right,_ somehow, and Cecil was gripping him so tightly that Carlos was having trouble telling their heartbeats apart- but he knew, with utter certainty, that there were two of them. Only then did he cry.

He stepped back from Cecil, back from this man he loved so fiercely that it hurt, back until he hit a wall, and he sank to the floor. His hand went to his mouth, and the sharp sting of teeth breaking flesh was almost, _almost_ enough to convince him that this was real and not some wonderful, agonizing dream.

Cecil took off his coat and crouched, approaching him as one might approach a wounded animal, clearly at a loss for what to do. Carlos pulled his knees to his chest, shaking with the effort of staying upright, unsure of whether he should fall into Cecil’s arms or run as fast as possible in the other direction. Losing someone- losing Cecil- had been a thing he felt sure he could eventually wrap his head around. This, however, was different and strange and it _hurt_ in ways he couldn’t begin to understand. _It didn’t make sense,_ after everything that had happened, to have Cecil sashay back into the house like nothing was wrong. Nothing could be that easy, even in Night Vale.

More than once in their time together Cecil had been constrained to inaction when Carlos needed him. Carlos had been hurt or scared or in danger and they had been separated by the vagaries of time or space or professionalism, and Cecil had been unable to help him. Not so now. He tugged Carlos into an embrace, holding him as tightly as he could manage, letting him shake himself to pieces on the kitchen floor.

“Care to tell me what this is about?” murmured Cecil into his hair once Carlos had quieted.

Cecil’s arms were warm and tight and beautifully grounding, and when Carlos raised his head to look at him, Cecil’s eyes were wide and comforting and curious. He took another breath, deeper this time (when did that become so difficult?) and choked “I thought you were dead. After the radio, I was sure…I lost you, Cecil. You were gone.”

Cecil frowned. “I told you about the blood sacrifice, dear Carlos. Didn’t I?”

Carlos blinked at him, puzzled and incredulous, and said “You didn’t tell me they’d be gutting you on air.”

“I wouldn’t describe it as gutting. Ritual dismemberment, maybe?”

“And on what grounds what I expected to anticipate your survival of such a process?”

Cecil laughed airily. “I told you I was coming back.”

“You most certainly did not!”

Carlos could practically see the wheels turning in Cecil’s head, watched as he replayed their last conversation together. He watched Cecil’s face go from “affectionate confusion” to “horrified guilt” in the space of less than five seconds as he realized what had happened. “Oh, my dearest Carlos.”

He gave up on speaking then, and allowed Cecil to tug him forward until they were tangled together on the kitchen floor. Small, ugly noises forced their way out of Carlos’ throat as the accumulated weight of the last few days caught up with him. He could not, later, be sure of how long he cried, only that Cecil held him the entire time, rocking gently and humming into his hair. 

When he had settled, body suffused with fatigue and a strange absence of pain, filled up with a new, glorious numbness, Cecil pulled him to his feet and bundled him into a kitchen chair. He grabbed a tissue box and dried Carlos’ tears, frowning gently at him when Carlos refused to let him go for more than a few seconds at a time. “I have to make us dinner, love,” he murmured.

A quiet noise of dissent escaped Carlos’ throat before he could think to stop it, and Cecil sighed. “Darling Carlos, I am fine.” He stood up, despite Carlos’ squeak, and lifted his shirt. “See? Not a scratch.” He poked at his stomach. “Woefully empty, though.” 

Carlos frowned at him, then slowly relinquished his hold on Cecil’s belt loop. Cecil bent to press a kiss to Carlos’ head and murmured “thank you,” into his hair.

Carlos stared as Cecil moved through the kitchen preparing dinner. He found himself mesmerized, caught up all over again in the man. It took Cecil longer than usual to make dinner, mostly because Carlos stopped him whenever he passes the table, grabbing his wrist to kiss his hand, grazing his hip, pressing gentle, disbelieving fingers against the small of his back. The delay was palpable, though Cecil himself was apparently as spry as ever. Moreso, even, Carlos thought. 

It was marvelous, addicting even, to have Cecil’s skin against his own again, to be allowed to bask in the warmth and light and safety of their home, of a home shared. The cold, logical part of his brain knew that physical contact prompted the release of oxytocin, that kissing spawned serotonin, that the slow flood of warmth he was experiencing was chemical, if anything. The rest of him was falling in love all over again.

There was a second, smaller part of Carlos’ brain, one he had learned to distrust, one that resulted in words that earned laughter or confused stares from his colleagues. This was the part of his brain that prompted him to rhapsodize about the shapes that make our universe. This was where he found excitement in predictable order and comfort in the corresponding chaos. This was the voice that drove him to attempt, however feebly, poetry about the fundamental truths of the world that he inhabited. The part of Carlos that delighted in beauty told him that today, here and now, he was bearing witness to his own private miracle, padding through their shared kitchen in argyle socks and periodically shooting him shy, adoring smiles. The rest of Carlos believed it.

Dazed, lovestruck, not quite aware of his surroundings, it took Carlos a moment to realize that Cecil had stopped moving and stood in front of him, radiating affection. Carlos looked up into his face and Cecil took both his hands. “Should be about 20 minutes,” he said.

Carlos just smiled and brought Cecil’s fingertips up to his lips to kiss each of them in turn.

Cecil grinned, pressed his mouth to Carlos’, and dropped to his knees in front of the chair.

“Cecil, what-?”

He looked up at Carlos and cocked an eyebrow. “Do I really need to explain myself here?” He rested his hands on Carlos’ thighs and sat back on his heels, waiting.

Carlos looked down at him, his mind a riot of surprise, desire and – disappointment? He licked his lips, trying to articulate that feeling. “Cec,” was where he finally settled, pressing a hand against the other’s cheek. “Not like this.”

Cecil leaned into Carlos’ palm and removed his hands from their perch. “Alright.” He smiled and gently, without apparent ulterior motive, leaned up for a kiss. “Can I ask why?” he whispered once Carlos had obliged him.

“I don’t-” Carlos faltered, sighed, and started again. “I _do_ want you. But, not like this, rushing to finish in the kitchen, too fast to appreciate what we have in front of us. I want you properly. I want you upstairs, in bed, slowly. I want all of you,” he added, meaningfully.

“I don’t think we have time for that before dinner.”

“We can wait. I would rather wait and take my time with you than only have this right now.”

“One more question, then, my darling Carlos. Is there any reason we can’t do both?”

Carlos’ mouth was suddenly very dry, and he gulped. Something dark and hungry moved behind Cecil’s eyes. “N-no. No there is not.”

Cecil put his hands back on Carlos’ thighs, and when Carlos did not move them threw him a delighted, predatory grin. It was flashed carelessly, recklessly, without apparent understanding of the consequences. Or perhaps Cecil understood them all too well, because after that grin, Carlos was lost. He groaned, and struggled to undo his fly as quickly as he was able with clumsy, shaking fingers. Cecil stilled his hands and tugged his pants down just enough to free him, and then bent his head to Carlos’ cock.

Carlos threw back his head and sighed, briefly losing himself in the moment. Half a second later he struggled back upright, forcing his eyes open, determined to remain present as Cecil rendered him as helpless as was possible for a man sitting up in a chair in his own kitchen. He willed himself to remember this, and not to lose himself in the warmth and heat of Cecil’s mouth, the gentle scrape of teeth along his skin, the insistent throb of fingernails digging into his thighs. He tangled his fingers in Cecil’s hair and fought to memorize everything about this moment- the smell of food on the stove, the sounds of the chair creaking and Cecil moaning messily around him, the coolness of saliva drying on his legs and the straw-dry feeling of Cecil’s hair in his hand. 

He drew a harsh, shaky breath, and let it out suddenly as Cecil’s tongue caught a spot that was gloriously sensitive in a way that Carlos did not remember. He looked down, tightening his fist in Cecil’s hair and his lover groaned, low and wanting, and looked up to meet his eyes. Cecil’s gaze was thoughtless and hungry and so very _honest_ that Carlos lost himself just then, bent over and around and into Cecil and sat there, spent, as his lover stood, wiped his mouth delicately on a tea towel, and pressed a sticky kiss to Carlos’ hair.

Carlos did not remember most of the rest of the night. Days later, he was sure they ate, and was pretty sure it involved potatoes, but couldn’t comment on how. His strongest memories were of Cecil’s hands, never losing contact with him for more than a minute or so. 

He got up to do the dishes after they had finished eating, but once Cecil noticed he was yawning uncontrollably, he tugged Carlos upstairs toward their room. “They can wait till morning,” he said gently. “I have a few days off anyway.”

“I think my coworkers would forgive me if I didn’t head in tomorrow,” said Carlos around another yawn.

“Oh, good,” purred Cecil in his ear. “ Because I have _plans_ for you.”

Carlos was asleep almost as soon as he got to bed.


End file.
